Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Somewhere along the line, many students come to the conclusion that studying for exams means staying up all night, drinking coffee by the gallon and rereading their textbook and notes so many times that their eyeballs bleed. Indeed, most students decide what to study next based on whatever is due next (or overdue). Few students…

You might be tempted to skip the parts of a chapter that you feel sure you know. Don’t do it. Instead, take advantage of a powerful research finding: Students who retest themselves by recalling information they could remember earlier do twice as well on an exam as students who skipped retesting themselves on familiar material. 

As soon as you can after class, do what Elliot Aronson did. Having done poorly on his midterms, thanks to his lousy note taking, he came up with a new strategy: “At the end of every class, I would find a little nook — sometimes even the nearest stairwell — read over my scribbled notes,…

A lecture is not like a DVD. For one thing, you can’t hit the pause button. For another thing, if you’re not giving the lecture your full attention, you will miss something important and not even realize it. So when you’re in class, don’t talk to your friends, send text messages or search the Web…

Suppose you’ve just read the material in the first section of a chapter, and it’s time for you to begin the recite phase. Start by trying to remember everything you can. Then look at the outline on the first page of the chapter and use it to jog your memory and remember even more. Check…

Students who visualize ideas remember them better than students who don’t. The key part of this technique is to make your images interact. Despite what you might read on all those “Train your brain!” websites, you don’t need to conjure up bizarre images; you just need to make the images interact. So when you read…

You can’t read your textbook the same way you check your Facebook page, at a quick, superficial level. Many students assume that the mind is a bin or a sponge; you just pour information into it, and it stays there. Sorry. For the information to stay there, you have to process it until you get it. When you…

Let’s say you’re supposed to read a chapter by your next class. Use these three basic steps:  Read a section of the chapter. Then close the book and hide your notes. Recite (speak aloud) everything you can remember about what you’ve just read. You don’t need fancy equipment. You can recite to yourself, to a friend, to…